The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Digital Research Initiative

The Exponential Growth of the Internet


 

Internet Traffic
Traffic on the Internet has doubled every 100 days.
In 1994, a mere 3 million people were connected to the Internet.
By the end of 1997, more than 100 million were using it.
 

 



Faster Growth

The Internet is growing faster than
all other technologies
that have preceded it.

Radio existed for 38 years before it had 50 million listeners,
and television took 13 years to reach that mark.
The Internet crossed the line in just four years.

 


Internet Commerce

Internet commerce and business will likely surpass US$300 billion by 2002.

Using credit cards, 10 million people in the United States and Canada had purchased something on the WWW by the end of 1997, an increase from 4.7 million people six months earlier.

 


Source: The Emerging Digital Economy,
April 1998 report of the United States Department of Commerce.


September 1991

Inbound traffic measured in billions of bytes on the NSFNET T1 backbone.
The traffic volume range is depicted from purple (zero bytes) to white (100 billion bytes).
It represents data collected by Merit Network, Inc.

November 1993

Byte traffic into the ANS/NSFnet T3 backbone.
The colored lines represent virtual connections
from the network sites to the backbone.

December 1994

Byte traffic into the ANS/NSFnet T3 backbone.
December 1994 represents the last heavy traffic month prior to the
official NSFNET decommisioning in March 1995.

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This site last updated September 7, 2002